Page 22 of Warrior Security
“It’s fuchsia, and it’s for the ferrets. Fuchsia for ferrets. It’s alliterative.”
“It’s magenta. And you built an entire color-coded system and then added alliteration?”
“The system is airtight. I will not be taking questions.”
He looked at me. Then he looked at the card. Then he looked at the wall where the other cards hung in their neat rows—blue for dogs, green for cats, yellow for the outdoor animals, orange for the rabbits and guinea pigs.
“Your system has a system,” he said.
“My system isflawless.”
“Your system requires a decoder ring.”
I snatched the card from him and hung it on the hook where it belonged. Tova, sprawled in the doorway of the feed room with her chin on her paws, watched the whole exchange without lifting her head.
We’d been reorganizing the feed room storage for the better part of an hour. Bags needed to be rotated, the shelves wiped down and restocked, the inventory sheet updated. It was the kind of work that didn’t require much conversation, but we’d been talking anyway.
Two weeks of working side by side had built something easy between us. He’d hand me a bag before I asked for it. I’d toss him the marker for labeling without looking up from the clipboard. The rhythm of it had become automatic, and I liked it more than I wanted to examine.
Logan was good company. His humor was dry, and it surfaced without warning, slipped in between tasks like he couldn’t help himself. He listened when I talked, which shouldn’t have been remarkable but was. And he worked without complaint, without shortcuts, without needing to be told what came next.
But damned if he didn’t look the same as the day he’d walked into Deja Brew. The fatigue hadn’t budged. It sat in his face, in the lines that deepened when he thought nobody was watching, in the set of his jaw when he came into the barn each morning already dressed and working before I’d finished my first cup of coffee.
I’d come out of my house at five fifteen two mornings ago, and he’d already been halfway through the feeding rounds. Which meant he’d been up long before that.
Which meant the nights were bad.
I knew what that looked like. I’d sat across from enough veterans at Pawsitive to recognize the gap between a man who held it together in daylight and one who was actually resting. Logan held it together. But the engine underneath was running on nothing, and it had been running on nothing since before he got here.
Tova shifted in the doorway and yawned. I looked at her. She looked back at me with those soft brown eyes that didn’t ask for anything and didn’t miss much.
Asking him to let Tova trail him during the day had been a start, but it wasn’t enough. The days weren’t his problem. I needed to get that dog into his cabin at night, and I needed a reason that didn’t sound like what it actually was, because no doubt he wouldn’t accept that.
“Question,” Logan said from behind the shelf. “Why does Clarence have a feeding card at all? He eats whatever he wants and screams at anyone who tries to stop him.”
“Clarence has a feeding card because every animal has a feeding card. That’s the system.”
“Clarence ate a button off my jacket yesterday.” He held up a bag of kibble and waited for me to point to the right shelf. I pointed. He slid it into place.
“That’s not on the card.”
“I’m aware it’s not on the card. I’m saying the card is irrelevant. Clarence has rejected the card.”
I capped my marker. “Clarence is on a journey.”
My phone rang.
I pulled it from my back pocket and glanced at the screen. The number wasn’t one I had saved, but the area code registered somewhere in the back of my brain. Upstate New York. I didn’t have to worry about it—nobody I knew there would be calling me.
I put it on speaker and set it on the shelf so I could keep working. “This is Lark.”
A pause. Then a voice I hadn’t heard in six years filled the feed room.
“Eleanor.”
My hand stopped on the clipboard. The name hung in the air between the shelves, and for two full seconds, I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I stood there with my fingers locked on the edge of the board and my brain trying to catch up to what my ears already knew.
Then I grabbed the phone off the shelf and killed the speaker.
